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in 2015 that use flash, disk and cloud storage to streamline data mobility and management across storage tiers. Listed alphabetically, here's our list of the top 12 storage startups to watch in 2016.

ClearSky Data's mission is to help enterprise customers shift more data to public cloud storage. Its distributed caching software provides a tiered storage triumvirate: branded appliances for on-premises hot data, ClearSky data centers for the bulk of its storage, and backup data to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud. The data storage company aims its global storage network at enterprises with at least 100 TB of primary storage. ClearSky launched with regional “point of presence” data centers in Boston, Philadelphia and Las Vegas and is poised to expand to other metro markets. The flash-based appliances replicate production storage via Gigabit Ethernet to a ClearSky data center, which in turn writes data for redundancy to a logical bucket of S3 object storage.

After helping usher in hyper-convergence as founder of Nutanix, Cohesity founder and CEO Mohit Aron set his sights on data convergence. The Cohesity Data Platform consolidates fragmented secondary storage on a single appliance. Analytics, archiving and data protection workflows can run on the Cohesity system while quality-of-service (QoS) software prevents resource contention. The system runs on Cohesity's OASIS (Open Architecture for Scalable, Intelligent Storage) operating system, which includes the object-based SnapFS distributed file system for simultaneously writing data to multiple nodes. Cohesity bundles OASIS on a 2U appliance that serves as the building block for a minimum four-node cluster of hybrid flash storage. Each node supplies up to 96 TB of hard disk drive (HDD) storage and 6.4 TB of flash capacity. Cohesity data storage technology provides continuous snapshots and granular recovery point objectives.

EMC Symmetrix inventor Moshe Yanai has a new enterprise SAN array platform with Infinidat. The InfiniBox F6000 SAN array provides 2 PB of usable capacity in 42U of rack space and handles 750,000 IOPS with 12 Gigabit per second (Gbps) throughput. Three servers comprise a single F6000 array containing 480 HDD, 3.2 TB of RAM and 86 TB of flash. The InfiniBox F2000 midrange array is an 18U configuration that scales to 330 TB with 4 TB HDDs. F2000 is rated for 500,000 IOPS and 7 Gbps of throughput, scaling to 576 GB of RAM and 38 TB of flash cache. All Infinidat arrays support Fibre Channel and NAS with asynchronous replication.

Austin, Texas-based infinite io is trying to capitalize on enterprises' growing concern about managing larger and larger concentrations of cold data. The NSC-110 is network-based controller hardware that uses flash to accelerate the performance of local NAS storage. While virtual edge filers are not new, infinite io's controller moves storage functionality from the subsystem to the network. Once plugged into the wire, the NSC-110 sits in front of a NAS system, and uses an automated policy engine to move cold data from primary storage to lower cost tiers or cloud storage. File systems or mount points do not need to be added, and the application data path does not have to be changed. The infinite io controller handles short metadata requests in flash cache to boost application performance.

Billed as scalable and storage-agnostic, DataSphere is designed to virtualize data across storage tiers under a global data space. Founders David Flynn and Rick White are former data storage company executives at PCIe flash pioneer Fusion-io, while Apple founder Steve Wozniak serves as chief scientist. Primary Data dynamically places data across shared networked storage and cloud storage, based on user-defined automated service levels. Primary Data's out-of-band metadata engine fields application requests and allows the data to be accessed with any storage. Software analytics monitor storage utilization and performance. DataSphere software is sold on a subscription basis as a physical or virtual appliance to manage file, block and object data. Archiving and disaster recovery, data migration across tiers, improved application performance and load balancing are among projected use cases.

Built-in data protection is a key feature of Reduxio's midrange hybrid storage array. The system's BackDating feature enables end users to recover data from any point in time. Unlimited snapshots and inline data deduplication conserve space and provide historical tracking. The 2U Reduxio HX550 array scales to 40 TB of raw storage with 24 HDDs or HGST Inc. eMLC flash drives. By default, Reduxio writes deduplicated and compressed data to flash and keeps all active data on SSDs. Incoming data is broken into 8K blocks, with each block deduplicated and compressed in a buffer before going to memory. Reduxio provides a unique stamp to each block. It then virtualizes and categorizes the blocks in its database and maintains a separate set of metadata.

Savage IO takes a different approach than most software-defined storage vendors. The data storage company does not provide storage management software of its own, but focuses on high-performance commodity servers, storage and controllers that support other vendor's storage software. The SavageStor 4800 4U appliance targets HPC, big data analytics and cloud storage workloads. SavageIO designed it with dual 12-core processors and 512 GB of memory, along with a high-speed backplane that comprises 12 dedicated SAS lanes with 1 or 10 GbE, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel over Ethernet connectivity. The SavageStor array is rated to handle up to 800,000 IOPS. SavageStor supports up to 48 drives that can be a combination of SSDs, SAS and SATA hard disk, and four SSDs for caching. A single enclosure supports capacity up to 192 TB.

Velostrata wants to remove the obstacles that prevent enterprises from using hybrid cloud storage. Cloud Edge lets customers stream virtual machine workloads to the public cloud, yet retain on-premises control of their data. Velostrata keeps applications in local storage and sends only the data needed to boot a production VM as a temporary cloud instance in Amazon Web Services. Velostrata appears as a virtual storage appliance managed in VMware vCenter. Conversely, the Velostrata software reimports cloud-based data to local data center storage when a VM is decommissioned and retains a boot image should it need to be promoted into service again. Cloud Edge includes QoS and read/write caching across multiple tiers. Cloud Edge pre-fetches application data based on historical access patterns.

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